Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [68]
The Ultra 64 would never be released. At least, not under that name, a tribute to Nintendo’s Ultra devices from the 1970s. Konami had trademarked the name Ultra for a shell company (fittingly enough, one of its first releases was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title) to release extra NES games back in the day. Nintendo backed off using the adjective for its new system, hastily redubbing it the Nintendo 64.
And what a console! The N64 was designed around a Silicon Graphics CPU designed especially for low costs and 3-D graphics. Its 64-bit CPU was attached to a 32-bit system bus, which was the reverse of the feeble Atari Jaguar, which had a few 64-bit chips (and one 32-bit chip) all pushing data through a bottlenecking 16-bit CPU. The Silicon Graphics chip turned out to be almost too powerful: some developers only used 32-bit processing to make their 3-D characters and environs.
Even the controller was amazing, shaped like a trident head—room for three hands! Gamers could hold it one way to use the analog control stick, which the N64 popularized for the modern gaming age. If they preferred the direction pad, they could hold it another way to access that. Four yellow “C” buttons in a diamond on the right would work as a third control mechanism, or let players swerve a floating camera around. There was an expansion port for a memory card (not that many games would ever use it, thanks to saves available in each cartridge). That slot could also be used for a “Rumble Pak” to force feedback into the controller, which soon became a mandatory feature of every game controller. The entire thing was designed around the launch game Super Mario 64.
So what was holding up this marvelous console’s release? Super Mario 64. After spending a whole year on Yoshi’s Island, and producing a quickie puzzle game called Mole Mania for Game Boy, Shigeru Miyamoto was ready to tackle Mario’s first outing on the N64. His never-finished Mario FX game could be reborn on the N64: A 3-D Mario in a 3-D world. For a while he considered not even having a game, just an environment for Mario to explore.
The move to 3-D would be the biggest single design change games had ever seen. Every game franchise would have to figure out how to upgrade its look without losing the core gameplay and enjoyment that made it distinct. Racing games wouldn’t have to rely on Mode 7 fudging anymore. Sports games, stuck with replicating the flat camera movements of sports broadcasting, would see armies of polygons crashing into each other—and often waving hands and arms through each other. First-person shooters would thrive like rabbits in Australia. Everyone would learn about the uncanny valley, which posits that the more realistic an illustration is to its source, the more noticeable the errors. Larry Bird as a pile of peach and green pixels looks fine, but a photorealistic Allen Iverson looks like a zombie, despite being a thousand times more realistic.
Miyamoto had a tough decision to make for Super Mario 64, an adventure game: what to do with the camera? It could stay in a fixed position, and thus make an isometric game like Populous or Q*Bert. It could move according to a set program, making for an on-rails adventure. Or it could move all around, and thus cause chaos and confusion and people zooming the camera on Mario’s knee and then wondering why they couldn’t see anything but knee. Was there a way to solve this as elegantly as in Super Mario Bros., where Miyamoto designed a larger Mario and then came up with a brilliantly